On Fri, Apr 15, 2011 at 05:01:11PM +0300, Artem Bityutskiy wrote:> Well, I got this understanding by talking to the OMAP maintainer and by> chatting with rmk. But I might be wrong. So the understanding is that> board data extending is banned, at least for a while. And the arm world> has to consolidate and probably switch to the DT tree approach. This> would be painful, this would make some vendors to return to behind the> curtains, so this would be a step back in the short run.

Well, what Linus desires from ARM folk is a concerted effort to get theARM tree 'under control' and stop the thing forever increasing withoutany apparant control.

Linus has said is that if arch/arm/mach* show up with significant numbersof net additional lines of code in the diffstat, he'll refuse to pull thegit tree. (See various mails from Linus on linux-arm-kernel.)

My preference is to limit this merge window to just consolidation andbug fixes so that we can show that we're taking the issue seriously andare putting a decent amount of effort into addressing the problem.However, the problem with adding new stuff is that it dilutes thediffstat, and makes it much harder to show that we're doing what'srequired.

Eg, lets say we end up removing 1000 LOC, but end up adding 1000 LOC ofnew platform data via other trees. I don't think Linus will be pleasedwhen he comes to the end of the merge window and arch/arm/ again showsup heavily in the statistics without a significant reduction. I suspectif that were to happen, things will get much harder for us.

When you bear in mind that in total, arch/arm was pusing 60k lines ofnew code into the kernel _each_ merge window. If we manage to reducethe size of arch/arm by only 10k, it is really just a small drop in theocean in comparison - we need much more effort than that...